Aquapolis
Image: Aquapolis. Kiyonori Kikutake 菊竹 清訓. 1975
The year is 1975 and Houston's Kashmere Stage Band, a group of high school students, are performing soul, funk, and jazz around a floating futuristic ocean city-machine prototype that has taken decades to conceive and build in remote Okinawan waters. This moment in a $550 million spectacle might be my favourite minor and most expensive cultural-exchange footnote in futurist history.
A year later in the Astrodome, Houston's and the world's largest air-conditioned room, attendees of the Eighth Annual Offshore Technology Conference reviewed presentations on the technical details of a floating structure so big that a new wet dock had to be built to accommodate it, as well as the roads, bridges, and energy supply it needed. The megastructure was Aquapolis, a proposal for a city of the future, imagined by architect Kiyonori Kikutake 菊竹 清訓.
Aquapolis belongs to that category of emphatically futuristic and experimental schemes that escaped the drawing board and became physical reality, though the built version differed considerably from the architect's experimental vision.
At Expo 75 in Okinawa, which hosted the pavilions of 37 countries, the artificial island floated on four lower hulls. Measuring a hundred metres wide and thirty-two metres high, it stood as tall as a ten-storey apartment building and stretched as wide as a city block. Five tugboats towed Aquapolis into position off the Okinawan coast, where it was secured to the seabed through a system of buoys and anchors that provided stability in the rising and falling seas. Within it was the Japanese Government Pavilion, showcasing the latest development in marine exploration technology.
Expo 75's theme was The Sea We Would Like To See, and the exposition area covered a million square metres (about half a square mile) of subtropical land and water. The centrepiece machine, Aquapolis, was 15,000 tons of metaphor used to impose an idea of what adapting to the future should look like.
Image: Kiyonori Kikutake 菊竹 清訓 and a model floating city. 1973
The technocratic motivations behind Expo 75 and similar world-scale projects are worth a separate examination, which I will share in an upcoming note. Several directions emerge from the Aquapolis moment, each leading toward different interpretations of floating futures.
Japan's investment in marine megastructures in those years painted a favourable self-portrait of industrial sophistication while symbolically reclaiming Okinawa in an elaborate and controlled global ritual. The band playing heavy soul was, of course, a tiny decoration. But it's a creative and guileless moment. It's good to know kids making music and animatronic squid could play a part in such a highly articulated spatial reification of major powers.
A second trajectory follows the libertarian seasteading movements that emerged decades later. Just one example, from 1997, also loops back to Texas. Futurist architect Wolf Hilbertz, a University of Texas professor, and marine biologist Dr. Thomas Goreau, began constructing their vision for a sovereign micronation called Autopia. A place that builds itself.
This carried forward something of Kikutake's spirit of adaptation and metabolism, though redirected toward different ends. Their proposal would have occupied an area roughly the size of Vancouver Island, Canada, positioned in international waters and assumed to be governed only by maritime law. A very different political vision from Aquapolis, where floating architecture serves individual autonomy rather than state exhibition.
The Metabolist context provides a third direction. The architectural movement's 1960 manifesto consisted of four essays: Ocean City, Space City, Towards Group Form, and Material and Man, each exploring different domains for architectural expansion. These deserve a deeper reading to understand the motivation and urgency for addressing human habitation in extreme or remote environments in the middle of the century. Aquapolis was Kikutake's opportunity to test floating city principles at full scale, addressing the ocean realm of the Metabolist vision.
The decision to prove these concepts in open ocean (Autopia) and Okinawa's remote, underdeveloped landscape (Expo 75) suggests a pattern: the attraction of seemingly empty spaces for ambitious projects. Undeveloped territory offered Japan's construction machinery freedom to operate without obstruction, while the ocean held out the promise of complete liberation from land-based limitations. Anyone familiar with desert environments recognises this same magnetic pull toward grandiose schemes in vast, seemingly vacant places.
Image: Kashmere Stage Band’s Expo '75 Concert Tour, Jumbo Roll Stage
Image: Offshore Technology Conference in the Astrodome, Houston. 1976
In 2023 Okinawa Archive on Okinawa Television 沖縄テレビ放送株式会社 introduced Aquapolis from 8mm footage from 1975. The linked video shows the size of the structure from above, crowds, people moving through the machine's tunnels, and underwater themed exhibits.
The theme-park style exhibits of blinking cartoon fish distract from the truth that nothing like Aquapolis had ever been built. The concept depicted an ambitious and adaptable structure. The technical requirements of such an experiment pushed the limits of engineering and construction methods. Though I haven't been able to see it (please email me if you have access to a viewable copy) Matsuyama Zensō's 1976 documentary film, Okinawa Kaiyōhaku / Okinawa Ocean Expo includes scenes where Aquapolis rides ocean waves caused by the approach of a typhoon.
The contradiction that emerges over time, upon the physical realisation of the biggest, grandest, and most ambitious projects is this: the moment they are complete they are almost instantly quaint. The future, as a vision, recedes relentlessly. Polis, by Greek definition, is the public place. Aquapolis closed to the public in 1993 due to declining visitor numbers and the ageing of the structure. It's trite but true to say there can be no future without a past, and with no record of Aquapolis (no permanent reminder of a prototyped public institution) it, too, becomes a minor and expensive interlude.
Agreeing with this, I will up the ante on emphasising the footnote moment of professionals in the Astrodome studying the Aquapolis scientific presentations and the Kashmere Stage Band's performance. Both exchanges likely outlasted the megastructure in personal memory. Aquapolis was demolished in 2000 and the Astrodome sits empty.
According to Kikutake's original design philosophy, Aquapolis was meant to be sunk to the ocean floor at the end of its useful life, where it would exist as a reef for marine life. The structure would transition from serving human habitation to supporting marine ecosystems. The contrast between the architect's radical reimagining of a building's lifecycle and the mundane reality of its ker-plunk disposal is another gap between ideals and practical realities.
People still remember the high school students who played music celebrating a floating city. These footnotes endure in funny ways, proving more durable than the ambitious architecture designed to contain them.
June 9, 2025—
The ocean is a silent place, when it is being kind
Where only slapping stays tap out the pace of time
Where the motion of the ocean, is in a dancing line. - Thomas Goreau
References
Blaxell, Vivian. 'Preparing Okinawa for Reversion to Japan: The Okinawa International Ocean Exposition of 1975, the US Military and the Construction State'. The Asia-Pacific Journal 29-2-10 (19 July 2010).
More notes
